Dame Denise Rosemarie Lewis (born 27 August 1972) is a British sports administrator and former sports presenter and athletics athlete, who specialised in the heptathlon. She won the gold medal in the heptathlon at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, was twice Commonwealth Games champion, was the 1998 European Champion, and won World Championships silver medals in 1997 and 1999. She was the first European to win the Olympic heptathlon, though Europeans, including Briton Mary Peters, had won the Olympic pentathlon precursor event.
Her personal best score for the heptathlon is 6,831 points, set at the Décastar meeting in 2000. That is a former British record and ranks her third on the all-time British lists behind double World, double Commonwealth Games champion Katarina Johnson-Thompson and Olympic, three-time World and European champion Jessica Ennis-Hill. Along with these two and pentathletes Mary Rand and Dame Mary Peters, Lewis is recognised as one of Britain's greatest female multi-eventers, and the first in the line of British global champions in heptathlon.
Since retiring from athletics, she has undertaken work on television and other media work, and was a regular athletics pundit for BBC Television, including during the Olympic Games in London 2012, Rio 2016, Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024. It was announced that she had stepped down from her role at the BBC on the conclusion of the athletics programme at the 2024 Games. In addition to her media work, Lewis is president of Commonwealth Games England which is the official Commonwealth Games Association for England at the Commonwealth Games and, since 2023, president of UK Athletics, the governing body for the sport of Athletics in the United Kingdom.
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